Behind the scenes at Bugatti's 282mph Mistral world record run

Silence? At a land speed record attempt? You imagine there’d be excited chatter and bellowing engines, but it’s eerily quiet at the Papenburg proving ground in northwestern Germany. Not a breath of wind to knock the rusty leaves from the branches, or disturb the limp trackside wind sock.

Two white pinpricks peer through the mid-morning mist. A faint hiss builds into an air shredding roar and in a neck tweaking rush, a black and orange Bugatti Mistral rips down the main straight. Brake lights and the orange underbelly of the air brake pierce the gloom.

Andy Wallace has just set a new world speed record for a roofless car: 453.91kph (282.04mph). Polite applause ripples from Bugatti’s engineers, then silence reigns again. Another day at the office for the world’s fastest car company.

Photography: Richard Pardon

Bugatti, as I’m sure you know, has been the speed record final boss this millennium. Veyron: 253mph. Veyron Super Sport: 269mph. There was also a convertible, the Veyron Vitesse, which reached a roofless 254mph back in 2013.

Each of those records was gradually bested by American upstarts SSC and Hennessey until every once in a while, Bugatti drops the vmax mic. Cue the Chiron Super Sport: 304.7724mph in 2019.

But Bugatti seemed content to let Texas own the glory of ‘fastest open top road car’. Hennessey’s Venom GT Spyder – a dragster V8 claiming asylum in a Lotus Exige – went 265mph a while ago and no one’s responded. Koenigsegg keeps roofs firmly attached for flat out runs. Bugatti politely asserted it would never build a convertible Chiron.

The Mistral (named after a southerly French breeze rather than a category five hurricane) cannily wraps the latest Super Sport’s mechanicals up in a new coachbuilt body, but all 99 owners are restrained by a factory padlocked limiter to a mere 261mph.

All except one, who cornered Bugatti CEO Mate Rimac at the Goodwood Festival of Well Obviously and pointed out he was the only owner of each Bugatti World Record Edition. Veyron, Vitesse and Chiron. Wouldn’t it be great to complete the set with an unleashed Mistral, by throwing in a top speed attempt?

That’s why the base retail price for a Mistral is £4.1m, but the owner of this one paid £11.6 million for a car he won’t even take delivery of until 2026. Pricey certificate, that. But for a piece of history, to complete the ultimate collection from Bugatti’s W16 era? Probably a wise investment.

Usually, speed record attempts are conducted in utmost secrecy just in case there’s a whoopsie and Elon’s Tesla Roadster is joined in outer space by a brightly coloured streak of carbon fibre. But Bugatti’s been brave enough to grant TopGear exclusive access over the decades. You’ll remember James May briefly holding the record in the Veyron Super Sport, before company test pilot Pierre-Henri Raphanel added 10mph to Captain Slow’s total. TG mag was on the ground at the Ehra-Lessien test track when the Chiron surged past 300mph in the courageous hands of Andy Wallace.

This time, the invitation was to a little known test facility on the German/Dutch border. Because Bugatti has been reassigned as a joint venture with Croatian electric disruptor Rimac, it’s not strictly a tentacle of the Volkswagen Group any longer. Meaning VW’s vast test track – the very place the W16 Bugattis were guaranteed to strut their stuff – is now off limits. Its replacement is far from ideal.

Papenburg’s oval track has tighter, steeper banked corners, and the straights linking them are only 2.7 miles long: half what you’d enjoy at Ehra, where the runways are so generous the horizon is lost under the curvature of the Earth. Andy Wallace explains a lack of space is merely the amuse-bouche of challenges when it comes to laying down a new world record.

“I dunno why you’d try and do it in November,” he shrugs in the morning chill. “During the runs there’s little tiny bits of – I guess it’s not rain – but it’s moisture on the screen building up. And you think, ‘Hmm, I wonder how much grip there is?’”

Then there’s the access bridge over the straight muddling the aerodynamics. “I’m coming under there at 427kph [265mph]. As soon as you get under, it kind of moves the car over, so I guess there’s an interaction between all the air under the bridge going on.

“I’m also not using the lane closest to the barrier because you get some instability. As the road goes flat, it sucks the car to the left. You’ve got to be really careful you don’t touch a barrier.”

It’s the understatement that gets me. A one off, two tonne, 1,578bhp land jet with no roof, trying to drag him into the Armco, and he’s ignoring the track speed limit of 155mph for the banking and exiting the bend at almost 190. The ambient temperature is 6°C. Chilly equals good for the hungry turbos, but what the engine gains with denser air the car loses having to headbutt through the foggy soup. Engineers muttered earlier that at the business end of the run, the car would be a net 40 horsepower down.

But I spoiled the result earlier on because this was never in doubt. When we arrived at 7am Bugatti’s team of engineers were all sporting puffer jackets with Mistral World Record Car logos, matching the insignia on the underside of the car’s wing and its numberplate. I heard a rumour they’d been on a recce weeks earlier (in kinder weather) and already achieved a speed that’d have the Guinness people ripping up their record book, but what’s the point in telling people you’ve been to the moon? This is the era of the permanently sceptical and chronically online. You have to be able to show them.

So in addition to the squadron of laptop wielding Bugatti engineers, two nervous looking French blokes from Michelin wincing at the tyres, the owner’s family and yours truly, we were joined by an eight-person film crew, an Audi RS6 tracking car carrying a camera worth more than the car itself, and a helicopter flown by Germany’s answer to Tom Cruise, a low level daredevil with a penchant for getting the shot.

While the boffins studied power curve graphs and frowned at satellite forecasts, the motion picture division swarmed the Mistral with suction cups, rigging, duct tape and mounts, festooning every angle with cameras and microphones. Andy’s carbon helmet was treated to a chapstick-sized camera designed to break off if any force was applied to it, giving viewers a driver’s view without compromising his safety. By the time the Mistral was ready for its close up, the interior was a snake pit of wiring and auxiliary power sources, with audiovisual gadgetry vying for passenger space with the onboard speed verifying GPS recorders.

Even though Bugattis uniquely quote their tyre pressures to two decimal places, meticulously perform a preflight check at every startup and boast the most accurate speedo in the world, the German regulating authorities weren’t going to allow Molsheim to mark its own homework.

That turned out to be a formality. The Michelin gendarmes allow Andy six laps on the record tyres: he does a 230mph warm up, then hits 279, 280, 281 and finally 282mph before calling it a day. Tyres swapped, he gives the owner a shotgun ride. I’m not aware of a Guinness world record for the fastest passenger in a production car, but given there’s only one road car that’s ever been faster and Andy nearly eclipsed his own benchmark while two up... that must be another rosette for the staff room fridge.

With the owner suitably giddy and immediately jetting out of the country, the afternoon’s reserved for filming. The Mistral blasts past umpteen times as the Red Baron’s great grandson attempts to give us a haircut with his attack chopper.

It’s fascinating and scary: a fitting final flourish for one of the 21st century’s most insane pieces of engineering

For ground based car to car video, the 600bhp RS6 is left panting. Happily, Bugatti’s brought along its factory runabout Chiron Super Sport, with a wing clipped drone strapped to its backside. I might not hold any records but I’ve done a fair chunk of driving for video, so I volunteer to drive the practice runs while Team Hollywood sets exposure and depth of field. Pierre-Henri takes the lead in the Chiron Super Sport, Andy’s beside me in the now decluttered Mistral barking instructions into a walkie-talkie I can’t hear, and we’re off, formation flying at 237mph one car length apart. To a Bugatti this is child’s play, no more alarming than a motorway convoy.

But we’re losing the light so the speed limited camera car peels off, and I’m allowed to give the Mistral all 1,578 beans. Murky afternoon, someone else’s £11m one-off... best not go crazy. I do my best to interpret Andy’s sign language of when to lift, when to counterintuitively accelerate into the bend to stay set into the banking, and when to bury it. The Mistral whooshes me up to an utterly stable, completely non-eventful 245 miles an hour, then purrs back to the pits.

Helmet off, it’s bizarrely refined: the Mistral has spent months in wind tunnel testing and the result is a car that’s less buffety at 150mph than a 911 Targa is at 70. The best bit? The noise.

Bugatti’s quad-turbo monster has found a new voice in this car, thanks to those snorkel intakes just to the rear of the seats and a much more potent exhaust than the Veyron. This legendary powerplant has always been numbers first and character second, but here all those whooshes, chirrups, sighs and woofles are uncorked. It’s fascinating and scary: a fitting final flourish for one of the 21st century’s most insane pieces of engineering. One more world record for the W16 before it retires. The storm before the calm.